The Evolved Apprentice - 9780262526661

Over the last three million years or so, our lineage has diverged sharply from thoseof our great ape relatives. Change has been rapid (in evolutionary terms) and pervasive. Morphology,life history, social life, sexual behavior, and foraging patterns have all shifted sharply away fromthose of the other great apes. In The Evolved Apprentice, Kim Sterelny arguesthat the divergence stems from the fact that humans gradually came to enrich the learningenvironment of the next generation. Humans came to cooperate in sharing information, and tocooperate ecologically and reproductively as well, and these changes initiated positive feedbackloops that drove us further from other great apes.

Sterelny develops a new theoryof the evolution of human cognition and human social life that emphasizes the gradual evolution ofinformation-sharing practices across generations and how these practices transformed human minds andsocial lives. Sterelny proposes that humans developed a new form of ecological interaction withtheir environment, cooperative foraging. The ability to cope with the immense variety of humanancestral environments and social forms, he argues, depended not just on adapted minds but also onadapted developmental environments.